My family and other people

“I once had a sweet little doll, dears, The prettiest doll in the world; Her cheeks were so red and so white; dears, And her hair was so charmingly curled.” When I was five I really wanted a big doll. As a rule, I wasn’t a child who really wanted things. I was quiet, obedient and shy. Also, where we lived, there was nothing to want. It was a dusty small town where family outings were walks to the vegetable market. On a typical evening out, I would be perfectly happy if we came back with a bunch of bananas. So why I wanted a big doll, why I deeply yearned and pined for it, and why it became my heart’s desire is a complete mystery. The dolls we had in the sixties were made of light, deformable plastic and had strung limbs and molded hair. Their eyes and lashes were painted open. If you were very lucky you could get one with hair that was tied up in a ponytail, hair that you could undo and brush. I had seen magical dolls that shut their eyes when you laid them down, large b...

Dadi, my great grandmother, was a child widow; a fifteen year old left with an infant daughter. She was luckier than most. She had an affectionate father who was willing and able to care for her and her child. But her hair was chopped off, she had to wear a single piece of white cloth, she had to give up fish and meat and fast every fortnight. Thereafter, her role in life was to reduce to a minimum the space she occupied in the universe and, once her father was dead and her daughter suitably married, be at the service of every relative who needed a nurse or a nanny. Of course there was no question of her inheriting any of her husband’s property. (Her relatives were not particularly cruel or unfeeling. Those were, and had always been, the rules for widows; and the relatives were regular, god-fearing, rule-abiding people.) Dadi and I lived in the same house for a couple of years, the house of her daughter, my maternal grandmother. You could tell she had been a beauty; she still wa...